40 years after Chile coup, widow of Victor Jara hopes to bring alleged killer to justice

Joan Jara recalls all too vividly the terrible state of her husband's corpse
when she collected it from the morgue in Santiago - the bullet holes to his
head and body, the mangled fingers that had so beautifully played guitar.

It was 40 years ago on Wednesday that she last saw Victor Jara alive, when the Chilean folk singer and theatre director left for his job as a university professor just hours after General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the country's elected socialist president, in a US-backed coup.

Mrs Jara, a dancer born 86 years ago in north London as Joan Turner, has tirelessly pursued her husband's persecutors for the last four decades.

And she hopes she will finally be able to describe those horrors in testimony to convict a former Chilean army officer, now an American citizen living in a Florida retirement community, who is accused in his homeland of beating and killing Mr Jara.

For Mrs Jara and her two daughters have just sued Pedro Barrientos in a US state court, under federal laws that allow legal action against alleged human rights violators living in America.

As Chileans hold a series of emotional commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the coup, Mrs Jara's battle to hold accountable her husband's alleged killer and torturer is emblematic of the country's struggles with the dark legacy of the dictatorship.

"It has been tough to keep fighting for 40 years but Victor's case is so important not just for us, but for all the families that are still suffering because of the brutality and the terrible crimes committed in those years," she told The Daily Telegraph.

"We have been seeking to bring those responsible to justice for four decades so a breakthrough in any case is important for all of us."

Her hope is that the US lawsuit, filed last week by the Centre for Justice and Accountability, will bolster a ponderously slow case to extradite Mr Barrientos to Chile, where he was last year charged in his absence with Mr Jara's murder.

Tracked down in Florida by a Chilean television crew, the former lieutenant denied any involvement in the killings. But soldiers from his regiment have given a very different court testimony, saying that they witnessed Mr Barrientos torture Mr Jara and other prisoners held in a concert arena.

"After that, Lieutenant Barrientos decided to play Russian roulette, so he took out his gun, approached Víctor Jara, who was standing with his hands handcuffed behind his back, spun the cylinder, put it against the back of his neck and fired," said Jose Paredes, one of the soldiers.

Mrs Jara, who will join a procession in her husband's memory in Santiago today, was in New York earlier this week to attend a gathering of lawyers and activists involved in the detention of Gen Pinochet in Britain in 1998, the first time that a former head of state was arrested on the principle of universal jurisdiction.

She spoke to The Daily Telegraph sitting alongside Joyce Horman, the widow of an American journalist killed in the coup and who was played by Sissy Spacek in the 1982 movie Missing about her search for her husband. The two women are now close friends.

The young Joan lived through the Blitz in London as a schoolgirl, then "ran away from the chance of university to become a dancer". She moved to Santiago in 1954 with her first husband, a Chilean dancer in her troupe, and after they split she met Mr Jara when he was a pupil in her dance class.

She described how she last heard from him in a phone call from the university on the afternoon of Sept 11 1973.

"Victor called me to say that he couldn't get home because of the curfew, that he loved me and urged me to stay home and take care of the girls," she said. "What he didn't tell me was that he couldn't leave because the university was surrounded by tanks and under siege."

Mrs Jara learned from a smuggled message that her husband was among some 800 students and professors who were taken from the Technical University the next day to the Chile Stadium, a concert arena.

Given his prominence as a supporter of the Allende government, she feared the worst. "The days passed and I thought good God, what's happening to Victor, but I clung to the hope that somehow he had got out and was in hiding," she said.

Then on Sept 18 came the news she had dreaded, when a young man arrived at their home and told her she needed to come to the morgue. "It was a terrible sight. There were hundreds of bodies there, with terrible wounds, many with their hands bound behind their backs," she said.

"There was a passage lined with bodies and at the end there was Victor. I saw everything that they had done to him, the bullet wounds, the injuries to his fingers and body."

But she considers herself one of the lucky ones. "At least I knew what had happened to him. I wasn't left to wonder, like the relatives of so many loved ones who just disappeared. I was at least glad about that."

According to the estimates of the Chilean government, more than 3,000 individuals were killed by state agents or "disappeared" between 1973 and 1990; more than 27,000 were tortured; and at least 50,000 people were arrested and interrogated as suspected political opponents of the Pinochet government.

Mrs Jara was allowed to take his corpse from the morgue as long as she buried him without ceremony. His body was exhumed in 2009 on a judge's orders to establish his identity and cause of death. When he was reburied, thousands turned out for the funeral that he was denied after his death.

Mrs Jara moved back to London with her two daughters a month after the coup, after British diplomats urged her to leave for her own safety. She spent the next 10 years travelling the world to highlight what had happened in Chile, before moving back to Santiago in 1983.

There she established the Victor Jara Foundation to keep her husband's memory and artistic legacy alive and fought relentlessly to gain justice for him in death. She is closer than ever to achieving that mission.